Design Tools

Visage was created because we believe that good design should be available to everyone, not just organizations that can afford design agency premiums. It was born out of Column Five, an industry-leading information design agency founded in 2009, with offices in Newport Beach, California, and Brooklyn, New York.

For lo-fi animated work how about combining data visualization + animated gifs! This experiment investigates the use of animated GIF to better communicate Information Visualization techniques, insights or projects. We provide you with a Google Chrome extension to quickly capture and share the image as a GIF: what can you do with it? n Examples/references: Collection, Tumblr

Professional digital design for Mac. Sketch gives you the power, flexibility and speed you always wanted in a lightweight and easy-to-use package. Finally you can focus on what you do best: Design. Sketch is built for modern graphic designers, and it shows in every fibre of the app. From a flexible workflow with support for Multiple Pages and Artboards. Powerful features like Symbols and Shared Styles are there to make reusing elements quick and easy. Easily create complex shapes with our state-of-the-art vector boolean operations and take advantage of our extensive layer styles. Sketch’s fully vector-based workflow makes it easy to create beautiful, high-quality artwork from start to finish.

Professional drawing tool to create Sankey Diagrams. These diagrams show flows, where the width is proportional to the rate of flow. The diagrams can be created interactively, adding flow sources and sinks, moving nodes and flows around, editing colors, and more.

Scriptographer is a scripting plugin for Adobe Illustrator. It gives the user the possibility to extend Illustrator’s functionality by the use of the JavaScript language. The user is no longer limited to the same tools that are used by most graphic designers around the globe.

Paper.js is an open source vector graphics scripting framework that runs on top of the HTML5 Canvas. It offers a clean Scene Graph / Document Object Model and a lot of powerful functionality to create and work with vector graphics and bezier curves, all neatly wrapped up in a well designed, consistent and clean programming interface. Paper is the successor or (perhaps better) the alternative to Scriptographer for working with Adobe CS6 onwards. n Examples/references: Examples, Time Machine

Create your infographics with our 100% Live editor. The unique technology driving our infographics creator means no need to refresh, preview or reload. You see the changes you make to your content and layout live on the page. Choose from a variety of built-in infographics elements and create your infographics the easy way. With our infographics creator the sky is the limit. From the get-go, we built Infographics Presence with high-resolution graphical elements so that you can create beautiful infographics that attract viewers.

Datylon helps designers to easily create beautiful artwork with on-brand charts and maps. Data analysts can focus on their work and deliver their data insights in formats that can be readily used in story templates. The resulting data stories can be shared and embedded on the web or in applications whereby developers can add interactivity.

In response to the mentioned restrictions involving developing projects using Flash, Adobe has responded with its own range of tools for creating next-generation HTML5 projects and designed to “set the benchmark for standards-based web creation”. Of these, Edge Animate is the most interesting offering, designed to “create animated, interactive content for the modern web”, providing an alternative for projects that previously required Flash. n Examples/references: Showcase

Like much of the Creative Suite software, Adobe Illustrator is the industry standard application for creating incredible electronic illustrations. Whilst most of us think of creating graphs using statistical software, like many of those listed above, its huge depth of features and capabilities make it the ideal accompaniment tool to take the graphic composition to the next level. Illustrator gives you the complete control you require to polish existing graphs, creating new ones or combine separate elements into an inspiring, customised and hand-crafted infographic design. n Examples/references: Literary Organism, Visualisations tagged with Adobe Illustrator, Billion-Dollar-A-Gram

Affinity Designer for the Mac is the fastest, smoothest, most precise vector graphic design software available. Whether you’re working on graphics for marketing materials, websites, icons, UI design or just like creating cool concept art, Affinity Designer will revolutionise how you work.